Visiting the Chihuahuan Desert Nature Center

September 23, 2022

Chris and Heather talk with Lisa Gordon, Director of the Chihuahuan Desert Nature Center, about the variety of activities and exhibits available to visitors there. A network of moderate-difficulty hiking trails, a botanical garden, geology and mining exhibits, and a charming gift shop await you! What’s Chris’s go-to hike at the Nature Center? We know you’re DYING to find out!

View all episodes of the Heart of the Big Bend Podcast

Transcript for “Visiting the Chihuahuan Desert Nature Center”:

Intro
Welcome to the Heart of the Big Bend. It’s time to kick back, put your feet up, grab your favorite beverage or snack as we discussed, declare, proclaim, publicize and articulate about the wonders, magic, beauty, music and happenings here in the area known as the Big Bend of Texas.

Chris Ruggia
Hello welcome and thank you for joining us again for heart of the Big Bend. This is a podcast and radio show coming to you every other week about visiting the beautiful Big Bend of Texas. Specifically, we will cover what’s happening in Alpine, an incredibly friendly, small town nestled in a desert mountain valley at the heart of the Big Bend region. With easy day trips from Alpine, you can take in everything this amazing region has to offer. 

I’m Chris Ruggia, Director of Tourism for the City of Alpine, and today I’m joined by Heather Yadon from the Alpine Visitors Center.

Heather Yadon
Hello!

Chris R
Hey, it’s been a little while. Welcome back, Heather. Our special guest today is Lisa Gordon, Director of the Chihuahuan Desert Nature Center. Hi, Lisa.

Lisa Gordon
Hi there.

Chris R
We wanted to let people know about visiting the nature center. It’s probably the most extensive nature experience that’s closest to Alpine, I would say, for Alpine’s visitors. We can have a hike up Hancock Hill behind Sul Ross, you get out to see some nice landscapes, but you go to the nature center, you’re going to get a lot more immersive nature experience and a lot of interpretation as well. How would you describe the nature center in general?

Lisa G
Okay the nature center is on 507 acres of land and there’s actually two parts to it: one side is the nature center and that’s the rugged, natural side. It has hiking trails. Then we also have the botanical gardens, that’s our curated side that has native plants.

Chris R
When I go there, I usually go to the hiking side. I’ve been through the botanical garden, but for example, I guess I’ll say my favorite go-to is Modesta Canyon.

Heather Y
That’s what I thought he was going to say.

Chris R
Yeah, for sure. Every time, that’s where we go. But I will let people know though that’s a challenging hike if you have any mobility issues, any balance problems, I wouldn’t recommend it. The steps down get a little bit steep. It’s a beautiful hike, especially in the warmer parts of the year. We can get down in the shade, some water down at the bottom of the canyon.

Heather Y
When I go to the nature center, I go to the other side because Im not a big or great hiker. I do more of the cactus greenhouse and the botanical gardens part of it. I definitely have not done the big hikes that Chris has done. Another thing that a lot of people really enjoy is all the bird blinds, correct? Can you tell us about what kind of birds they can only see there?

Lisa G
Well, we have grassland birds. A lot of birders come and they’re very surprised that we have such a variety of birds in the region because the state park has Davis mountain type birds. We have the grassland down lower. We have cactus wren, lots of sparrows.

Heather Y
We have a beautifully done bird guide for the area, too, that gives people a checklist to take out there with them. I know you guys have one at your visitors center as well. The one we have covers the whole region, where yours is specific to the nature center, but if they get both of those, they can keep track as they go through. Again, I don’t know a lot about birds, but I know hat everybody wants to go to the nature center that comes here that’s into birds.

Lisa G
They do. Also at our bird blind, we have a 30-foot long water feature. The birds love it. We have later in the afternoon in the evenings we have all the wildlife that comes up. They help themselves to the water also. We have some great photographs of hte raccoons and foxes and javelinas coming up for a dirnk in the bird blind.

Chris R
When you come and look at birds and you don’t already know what you’re expecting to see, in that interpretation piece that we talked about, the handouts are really handy. Also in the botanical garden portion, you have a handout as well but even just walking around, you’ve got that interpretation, you’ve got the signs telling you what plants you’re looking at.

Lisa G
We do. First of all, in our bird blind we do have photographs, really great photographer named Carol Dequillio.

Chris R
She’s amazing.

Lisa G
She’s amazing, isn’t she? She’s shared her photographs of birds and did collages for us. We’ve got the walls covered inside the bird blind, and we printed those this year on metal. Joe Esparza did those for us in Alpine printing. Plug for him. The inside you can see what birds you might see at the bird blind. We do have the brochures that you mentioned about the botanical garden, also for all the hiking trails, and everything in the garden is labeled as you go through.

Heather Y
Which is what I always tell visitors. They’ll come ask me, “We just saw this cactus, what is it?” I’m all, “I have no idea.” because I don’t know all the names. That’s why I like going out there because you know what you’re looking at. And there’s a lot of people that you know they go into Big Bend, they go into Big Bend Ranch State Park, they go all these places and take pictures. They don’t know what they’ve got and they can find out what they’ve got.

Lisa G
Yes they can. One thing that I think is incredibly unique about the garden is that everything inside there is native to the Trans Pecos region. That’s not very common in a botanical garden; they just feature their native plants. A lot of times they feature just exotics or just pretty. We’ve got pretty and native.

Chris R
One thing that’s kind of dramatic as you approach the botanical garden is that fencing around it. This is a large space that is then protected from grousing by deer.

Lisa G
Eighteen acres that’s covered, protected. That’s to keep the deer and the ouidad and the elk, sometimes we have the elk that wander up there. Keep them out of there because it’d be like going to Luby’s cafeteria. They’d just go down the line saying, “give me one of those, some of those and can we get a couple more of those others.”

Chris R
There really is an extensive, not comprehensive – you can’t have every single plant form the area, but most of the large ones are really well represented. When folks come out here and they’re not used to desert lands, one, they’ll think everything’s a cactus that’s going to poke you, which just isn’t true. That’s something that those handouts can let you know, but there’s yuccas, there’s ocotillos, there’s all kinds of shrubs and their very well represented.

Lisa G
They are and the way the garden is set up, I tried to tell everyone I see how it’s set up so they understand it. It’s laid out so that when you first walk in, it’s so that you’re in lower elevation, maybe 3,000 feet so you get the desert-y plants of prickly pear and the ocotillo and there’s actually a creosote bush there. Then as you wander through, it’s as if the elevation increases. The you get to the woody shrubs and trees, lots of oak trees in that section. Then at the very top, it’s as if you’re at 6,000 foot level and there’s the little Alpine section with the pine forest. Then you come back around and that’s a half a mile loop. so there’s a lot inside there. We’ve got some really gorgeous plants. We have Hinkley oak, which is endangered. It’s very rare.

Chris R
It’s a little one.

Lisa G
It’s little, it’s not real showy. No, it just sits off over there, but it is quite rare.

Chris R
Then that covers a lot of the larger plants, but then the pollinator garden has a lot of the smaller flowering mostly perennials, I’m thinking?

Lisa G
Mostly, yeah. We’ve been working on that for the past couple of years. The pollinator garden was started, it was one of the early parts of the botanical garden. It’s built into the volcanic rock outcropping over there. So what’s really cool is that the planter beds are built into that rock and around. It utilizes the land shape to do the planter beds. This year, we’ve added to that and we have new beds coming out towards you as you walk up to it. Just to make that look so much prettier and last year we put in new signage that talks about native pollinators and how they work together with native plants. we’ve added hundreds of plants out there this year.

Chris R
We gotta get back out there and not go down the canyon this time.

Lisa G
No you need to come see it! There’s scarlet bavardia that grows almost out of the rocks. They’re blooming right now. The bee brush is blooming, there’s morning glories that are just intertwined with everything else that’s over there. It’s really gorgeous.

Chris R
It really is and when you go up into the pollinator garden, like you say, the beds are really built into the rock, the native rock and you’re walking through this almost sculpture garden of huge igneous, I’m thinking, rocks and that outcropping as you’re walking up. It’s really striking. One other thing that as I cast my mind around the landscape of the walks there that I think of are these water attachment things that water the wildlife.

Heather Y
Rainwater harvesting.

Chris R
Along the trail, you’ll see these little containers of water that are supplied by this rainwater.

Lisa G
Right. We have new signage that we’re working on right now and it’s in production. Last spring, we put in a new little introduction area, new trail to Modesta Canyon. We’re creating new signage for that and one of them is going to explain the guzzler. The guzzler, for anybody walking up to it, it looks like a big metal barrel and an upside-down umbrella shape. It gathers the water, which then travels down a very long pipe to a little basin area. We’ve got seberal pictures of wildlife that come in at night to come ge a drink.

Chris R
It’s very unassuming and it’s a small little metal box with water in it.

Heather Y
I imagine now it’s overflowing?

Lisa G
It’s overflowing, yes.

Heather Y
We are having our rainy season right now, for visitors to understand. Things are greener than they’ve ever been in years. I don’t even know what we can say, what – four, five yers since it’s been this green.

Chris R
Anybody not in town listening to this as it shows up in the podcast feed, make your plans to visit int he next 2-3 weeks, I would say. You will get a view.

Heather Y
Like nothing else. People who have come in the last couple of weeks to the visitors center are shocked by how green it is. They’re like, “We thought we were coming to the desert.” I’m like, “this is the desert, this is our rainy season.” We’re just glad that we get this rain this year because you’ve got over four inches the other day and everybody’s got so much rain. So come out now and you’ll see something you’ve never seen before.

Lisa G
It’s beautiful.

Chris R
This is the Chihuahuan Desert Nature Center, that’s one of the characteristics unlike many of the other deserts in the world where I think this is one of the most biologically diverse, actually vegetative deserts.

Lisa G
It is one of the three most biologically diverse deserts in the world. The other two, one is in south Africa and the other’s in Australia. I don’t have that name right now. It’s the largest desert in the western, most biologically diverse desert in the western hemisphere.

Chris R
When we’re coming from Alpine to get to Chihuahuan Desert Nature Center, just let people know you’re going to head on the Fort Davis highway, you’re headed toward Fort Davis and I’d say you’re 4/5ths of the way there. Give or take.

Lisa G
That’s an interesting way of saying it.

Heather Y
Twenty five minutes.

Chris R
Go to a little mountain pass.

Lisa G
It’s about 21 miles away.

Chris R
There you go. You’re heading up a hill, you’ve got some tight little curves, and just as you come out and the landscape opens, look out on your right. there’s a sign.

Lisa G
Slow down.

Heather Y
That’s right everyone, it’s right after the big curve.

Chris R
What are the hours these days?

Lisa G
We’re open Monday through Saturday, 9-5.

Chris R
Is there a fee, an entrance fee?

Lisa G
Yes. Adults are $6.50 each, children 12 and under are free. Dogs are welcome on a leash, actually any kind of pet on a leash is welcome. we’ve had two raccoons come before.

Heather Y
Oh wow.

Lisa G
Also a couple of cats on leashes have come to visit us. As long as they’re on a leash, they’re fine. They’re welcome.

Heather Y
That’s good for people to know, because there’s not a lot of pet-friendly parks and stuff here. That’s important.

Chris R
Definitely plan to spend a little time in the gift shop. It’s small but very well curated.

Lisa G
Thank you. We work hard to have local artists and craftspeople, craftsmen to represent their work there.

Chris R
You want to look out for those Carol Dequillio notecards, because those wildlife photos that she does are amazing. I’ve got one of burrowing owls on my fridge.

Tell us a little bit – your mission is this land site that’s open to the public, also have a lot of educational activities planned through the years. What’s an overview of that work that you guys do?

Lisa G
Our mission, the most important part of our mission is to educate people about the natural world, but also specifically about the Chihuahuan Desert region. By making education our important feature there, we have educational programs for school aged children throughout the year, but right now in the school year, we offer free programs for students in the region 18 region. In Texas, the schools are divided up into regions. Ours is a pretty large area that covers down to Big Bend and over to Midland area.

Chris R
You have a lot of class groups.

Lisa G
We have a lot of class groups, there are lot of very fun education groups, we structure them to tie very directly into what teachers are teaching at that grade level. We make sure that it’s something that enhances what they’re teaching that they can’t do in their own classroom. Right now, we have 5th grade Earth Rocks that’s coming up in October.

Chris R
That was in my mind and I was thinking that another thing to point out on the outside of the visitors center is that geology exhibit. You’ve got these examples of different kinds of rock.

Lisa G
It’s a rock timeline. I believe that one starts at 2.3 billion years old of the rock ages and it goes around to more current. We’ve integrated so the inside ties into that also. For Earth Rocks, that’s 5th grade and we’re getting schools signed up right now for that. It’s a fun program. Then in November, we’ll do Herp Day.

Chris R
That’s for herpatology, meaning lizards.

Lisa G
Lizards, amphibians. With that one, we get a lot of help from the biology department at Sul Ross. The students in the biology club come out and help us with that program. Then in the spring, we do Bugs, Bugs, Bugs day. The favorite part for the kids – we also get help from the biology department on that one, but I cook chocolate-covered crickets and crispy mealworms. They like those. They like to go to the bug tasting station.

Heather Y
Most of them actually eat it?

Lisa G
They do. And they learn about the world’s population that depends on eating insects as a source of protein. They learn the word entomophogy, where it’s rooted, where they come from and so on. These are 2nd and 3rd graders, they’re really cute. It’s fun when they bring their parents back saying, “yes this is the place where we ate the bugs!” We have another program for 1st graders and then in the summer we have critter camp for pre-k and kinder.

Chris R
Gotcha. For visitors, is there anything they might consider as they’re planning their trip that they could sign up for through the year? Because most of the things we’re talking about are through the schools.

Lisa G
Yes well those are – we do have programs. Do you mean for them to volunteer to help it?

Chris R
That’s a whole other opportunity.

Lisa G
For the participant, we have other programs through the year that they can come to and participate in. The comet lecture, the Roger Comet Distinguished Guest Lecturer program, that’s October 13th. Lewis Harvison’s going to be our guest speaker this year.

Chris R
The director of the Borderlands Research Institute.

Lisa G
We’ve been trying to get Lewis for two years. He was scheduled for April 2020. Every time we tried to cancel, there was another COVID surge. This time it’s on for sure. That’ll be at the Crowley Theater in Marfa at 7 pm on the 13th. That’s free. All of our programs are free. We have some generous donors. A lot of people come to our fundraiser that donate so that we can do all of our programs for the adults and also the students for free.

Chris R
Excellent. Let’s see, couple other things that crossed my mind in terms of things that people can see anytime that we haven’t mentioned. yet. One is the mining exhibit that Joe Mussey put together over many, many years. That is a fictional mine that he based it on a real one, but if this if were a real mine, this is how it would work. This is what they would be mining. He really put so much heart and soul into that.

Lisa G
He has and it would be called the Happy Jack Mine. We have a lot of visitors who come in and ask us, “what did you mine there?” I want to know where the gold is buried out there; I’m sure it’s somewhere. It’s an exhibit that talks about all the different mining in the region. It’s surprising how much mining has taken place in this entire Big Bend region.

Chris R
There’s a big map of the Chihuahuan Desert where he pinpointed every mine historically that had, I’m sure, probably one somewhere that suck in that’s not on the map. But it’s extensive. there’s a lot of mines on that map.

Lisa G
Joe and his wife Joyce come there almost every week to work on something, to fix it up, to spruce it up, and they’re out there visiting with our visitors and telling them about mining stories.

Chris R
If the Musseys are there when you arrive, be sure to get a tour from Joe. He has so much love for that exhibit and that subject. It’s infectious, for sure. The other thing that crossed my mind is of the hikes that we were talking about. There’s not just into the canyon, because there’s also two other loops that go around a couple of let’s call them small mountains.

Lisa G
Hilltops.

Chris R
Hills. Two hilltops. One of them, at the very top at Clayton’s Overlook, has another kind of geology exhibit around the visitors center we’ve got samples of the different kinds of stones. But up on the top, I know you just refurbished the signs. You can look all 360 degrees, I believe, or close to it. You’ve got an image of the landscape that you’re looking at on a panel right in front of you. It tells you how those mountains were made and when and what are they made of. That’s a lot of labor that went into that.

Lisa G
It’s a lot of labor. It’s really great graphics with it, it’s like cutaway of the mountain you’re looking at and then you get the real example on the horizon. It leaves you with an understanding of what’s inside mountains. Next time you see a mountain and you’re walking by or climbing on it, you wonder about, there’s more inside that. What’s inside that mountain?

Heather Y
How would you rate that walk/hike into that?

Chris R
Difficulty, that’s another thing to consider, yeah.

Lisa G
Our rating system that we’ve come up with is with a scale of 1-5 with 5 being the most difficult, we’d say that Modesta Canyon is 4 or 4.5 difficulty. Because that one section that you go down, you’re going down a quarter mile, 200 feet and that’s a steep grade.

Chris R
There’s steps that aren’t really steps.

Lisa G
They’re natural stones, rock steps. They were naturally there, so they’re irregularly placed and it’s single file. There’s a drop-off on the side. They’re not hand rails, so you’ve got to be super careful. If you have any knee, hip, or back problems, I always tell our visitors when I see them to know their own limitations. If they go even if they decide to do that hike, if they get on the way down there and say this is difficult, turn around and go back.

Chris R
No shame in not hurting yourself.

Lisa G
Exactly and when you go down 200 feet, you have to come back up 200 feet to the surface. So when you go down in the canyon, there’s a gorgeous Texas madrone tree there that a lot of people claim is the biggest they’ve ever seen. We haven’t had it measured to verify that, but it’s down there and the little pond and the year-round spring. But when you come out of the canyon, you go straight up a switchback trail to get up to the top. tats another 200 feet back up.

Chris R
You’re walking along almost a…

Lisa G
I call it a shelf ledge.

Chris R
A really fine sediment stone that’s turned up. It feels more precarious than it is, I think but it feels a little precarious.

Heather Y
So the geology stuff is all the way up.

Chris R
It’s throughout the whole hike.

Lisa G
That’s not the only way to get to the geology. That’s just the Modesta Canyon trail. So that trail, we just got off on talking about the difficulty. Back to the difficulty of the Clayton’s Overlook, we call that about a 3 or 3.5.

Chris R
Just some climbing, some elevation gain.

Lisa G
You go up 220 feet, but the trail goes diagonally around that hill so its a gentler incline. There are some places though that it’s a pretty big reach from one step up to the next can be 12-14 inches. You really have to be – we recommend walking sticks or hiking poles and good shoes. They don’t have to be hiking boots, but something good. I discourage people when they show up in flip-flops. you can’t do that.

Chris R
Maybe go into the botanical garden with flip-flops. You’ll definitely still have a good time.

Lisa G
Then we have the outer loop that I almost forgot to tell you about. You can connect all the trails and then it’s the outer loop it has the quarry, which you have a view of and that triolite rock that’s some really beautiful rock formations. People often see the ouidad down there and get excited over that.

Chris R
They’re striking animals. Aggressively invasive, but beautiful.

Lisa G
Fair, they do live there.

Heather Y
They live there now.

Chris R
I think that we’ve done a pretty good job of giving people the overall picture. I want to thank you, Lisa, for coming and sharing with us about the nature center.

Lisa G
Thank you, it’s been fun.

Chris R
I want to point people as well to your website – cdri.org thats the Chihuahuan Desert Nature Research Institute, which is the parent organization of the nature center. Thanks again Heather for coming back, we’ll talk to you again soon. Thank all of you again for joining us for Heart of the Big Bend every other week. You can get more information about Heart of the Big Bend at visitalpinetx.com/podcast or search for Heart of the Big Bend on Apple podcasts, Spotify, and most other podcast apps. And for all of you guys, listening to us on KALP/KVLF radio in Alpine, we’ll see you in two Fridays.

Outro
You’ve been listening to the heart of the Big Bend. Hope you liked what you heard and that you’ll find the time to experience all that the Big Ben has to offer. See you soon, partner.

View all episodes of the Heart of the Big Bend Podcast